Tuesday, 8 March 2016

High heels

Victoria Justice: checking her not-so-secret weapons

I can’t live without high heels. They may go in and out of
‘fashion’ but for me they are eternal.

Can I share with you Dabrela’s Two Laws? My First Law
states that the higher the heel the more it flatters the leg. The Second Law
qualifies the First by asserting that the higher the heel, the harder it is to
wear. What’s to be done? Well, you have to find a compromise. Go as high as you
can. It has been calculated that the average pair of high heels causes pain
after being worn for 66 minutes and 48 seconds. I’m not sure I can last even
that long. But one tip I offer up for free. Fix on the height you want to wear,
then invest in a pair that is an inch higher. Practise wearing the higher pair
and then when you go back to your shoes of choice – bingo, they feel a lot
easier!

There’s a lot of technique to wearing heels, and I suspect if,
like me, you’re burdened with a male body it’s harder to master. There are
skeletal differences between men and women. It’s a devil to master that
heel-and-toe rolling motion when your heel is a pointed instrument: not for
nothing is the word ‘stiletto’ borrowed from the Italian for ‘dagger’. Anyway,
here’s a video that I found helpful. It warns against three perils – wobbly
ankles, stiff knees and gripping of the thighs – and offers three bits of
advice:

Stand up straight with your chest reaching to the sky. It
will give an impression of confidence and counterbalance the weight-shift.

Engage the lower abs. This activates the lower back, which
is helpful for stabilisation.

Relax through the hips and knees. This helps you ‘glide
through the foot’.

In 2004 a Swedish scientist called Jarl Flensmark published
an academic article suggesting an association between the use of heeled
footwear and schizophrenia. “Heeled footwear,” he wrote, “began to be used more
than 1,000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of
schizophrenia ... Industrialisation of shoe production increased schizophrenia
prevalence. Mechanisation of the production started in Massachusetts, spread
from there to England and Germany, and then to the rest of Western Europe. A
remarkable increase in schizophrenia prevalence followed the same pattern.”

It was one of those daft papers that seem concocted
purposely to attract media attention. And sure enough the media picked it up.
You know the sort of thing: “Are Your Shoes Driving You Mad?” The argument was that the wearing of heeled
footwear coincided with the earliest historical reports of schizophrenic
symptoms. Because they are impractical, heels were originally a marker of
class, wealth and sophistication; if you were lucky enough to enjoy those
advantages you were also more likely to report mental ill-health, and many
European princelings and leaders of fashion were clearly off their rockers. Ergo, the elevated footwear drove them
nuts. As Brian Clegg points out in his demolition of Flensmark’s paper, this is
a classic confusion of correlation and causality. If there were a causal link, you might equally argue that the princelings
were mentally unbalanced to begin with and this illness caused them to make
irrational choices, opting for footwear that was anything but sensible.

Lots of theories have been advanced as to why women wear
high heels. It’s often said that heels make their bottoms protrude and wiggle
alluringly from side to side. In his book Curvology:
The Origins and Power of Female Body
Shape, David Bainbridge rejects this on anatomical grounds. He suggests two
other reasons. First, they force a woman to walk slowly and with shorter steps,
thus emphasising two characteristic features of female locomotion (sic). Second, tilting the foot makes it
take up less horizontal space, thus creating the illusion that it is smaller;
and small feet have proved attractive to men across diverse cultures.

Bainbridge’s book is illuminating on many topics but I think
he short-changes us on this issue, even though he recognises that high heels
are “the most common artificial means by which women emphasise their legs”. For
me the fascination of heels is that they combine vulnerability and potency. A
woman in heels can’t run – which means she can’t readily run away. At the same time, they lift her
off the ground, eliminating the typical height difference between men and women,
projecting her aspiringly upwards. I have a theory that many of the things that
hold most power over us do so by combining opposites: they are contradictions
held in dynamic equilibrium. Let me give another example. Why are children –
and indeed adults – mesmerised by dinosaurs? I think it’s because they shimmer
on the frontier between the real and the imagined. They have the
characteristics of fable – dragon-like creatures of unexampled size, strength,
ferocity – yet we know that they once existed, and though we’ll never see one
in a zoo scientists can tell us with increasing accuracy what they looked like
and how they lived. They are a union of opposites.

One of my readers commented that this blog is a bit cerebral and would “go over
a lot of girls’ heads”. Fair comment. Here I am, setting out to celebrate the killer
heel and I end up riffing on dinosaurs! But I suppose the coniunctio oppositorum is actually the key to my own nature: two
spirits in one body, male and female, held for the moment in uneasy
equilibrium. The male me wears sensible brogues. The female me owns far more pairs of
shoes than she can possibly wear, and most of those are ‘statement heels’.